"The reporters may want to go for those stories, but you're looking at a system where either the editors are violently reactionary or they're cowardly beyond words."

That's the crux of the problem. As the wingnuts are so fond of reciting, reporters are on average a bit to the left of centre (as you'd expect from folx who can read without using their lips), yet every survey ever done of the US media shows the output of those reporters to be on average well to the right of centre.

The only solutions seem to be (a) ownership of news media by a trust, as per a couple of the UK quality newspapers, so that there's no "owner" to interfere politically or otherwise with the journalists' journalistic decisions, and (b) state ownership of a news medium provided that it's enshrined in the country's constitution (or equivalent) that government interference is not permissible, and indeed the whole legal architecture is such that is not possible (Blair's Administration in the UK, to its eternal shame, did its damnedest to exert some control over the BBC, and got hardly anywhere).